Degrees of Freedom: Expanding College Opportunities - for Currently and Formerly Incarcerated Californians

This report begins with a background on the higher education and criminal justice systems in California. This background section highlights the vocabulary and common pathways for each system, and provides a primer on California community colleges. Part II explains why California needs this initiative. Part III presents the landscape of existing college programs dedicated to criminal justice-involved populations in the community and in jails and prisons. This landscape identifies promising strategies and sites of innovation across the state, as well as current challenges to sustaining and expanding these programs. Part IV lays out concrete recommendations California should take to realize the vision of expanding high-quality college opportunities for currently and formerly incarcerated individuals. It includes guidelines for developing high-quality, sustainable programs, building and strengthening partnerships, and shaping the policy landscape, both by using existing opportunities and by advocating for specific legislative and policy changes. Profiles of current college students and graduates with criminal records divide the sections and offer first-hand accounts of the joys and challenges of a college experience

Collective Bargaining: The Exclusion of Confidential and Managerial Employees

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the labor nexus standard for determining the exclusion of confidential employees from the rights conferred by the National Labor Relations Act has a reasonable basis in law. This article discusses the implications of the Court\u27s decision with respect to the coverage and the availability of those rights conferred by section 7 of the Act and the public policy behind exclusions from the Act\u27s coverage. Particular attention is devoted to a comparison between the purposes of the confidential employee and managerial employee exclusions from the Act\u27s coverage in terms of employees\u27 responsibilities, status, authority and duties of loyalty with respect to their employers

Multimorbidity and Mental Health‐Related Quality of Life and Risk of Completed Suicide

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148248/1/jgs15678_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148248/2/jgs15678.pd

Dietary flavonoid intake and weight maintenance: three prospective cohorts of 124,086 US men and women followed for up to 24 years

Objective: To examine whether dietary intake of specific flavonoid sub-classes is associated with weight change over time, including flavonols, flavones, flavanones, flavan-3-ols, anthocyanins, and flavonoid polymers. Design: Three prospective cohort studies. Setting: Health professionals in the United States. Participants: 124,086 men and women participating in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS), Nurses’ Health Study (NHS), and Nurses’ Health Study II (NHS II). Main outcome measure: Self-reported change in weight over multiple 4-year time intervals between 1986 and 2011. Results: Increased consumption of most flavonoid sub-classes, including flavonols, flavan-3-ols, anthocyanins, and flavonoid polymers was inversely associated with weight change over 4-year time intervals, after adjustment for simultaneous changes in other lifestyle factors including other aspects of diet, smoking status, and physical activity. In the pooled results, the greatest magnitude of association was observed for anthocyanins (-0.22 lbs, 95% CI -0.30 to -0.15 lbs per additional SD/day, 10 mg), flavonoid polymers (-0.18 lbs, 95% CI -0.28 to -0.08 lbs per additional SD/day, 138 mg), and flavonols (-0.16 lbs, 95% CI -0.26 to -0.06 lbs per additional SD/day, 7 mg). After additional adjustment for fiber intake associations remained significant for anthocyanins, proanthocyanidins, and total flavonoid polymers but were attenuated and no longer statistically significant for other sub-classes. Conclusions: Higher intake of foods rich in flavonols, flavan-3-ols, anthocyanins, and flavonoid polymers, may contribute to weight maintenance in adulthood, and may help to refine dietary recommendations for the prevention of obesity and its potential sequelae

Multimorbidity in Medicare Beneficiaries: Performance of an ICD‐Coded Multimorbidity‐Weighted Index

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155488/1/jgs16310_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155488/2/jgs16310.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155488/3/jgs16310-sup-0001-Supinfo.pd

Learning associations between clinical information and motion-based descriptors using a large scale MR-derived cardiac motion atlas

The availability of large scale databases containing imaging and non-imaging data, such as the UK Biobank, represents an opportunity to improve our understanding of healthy and diseased bodily function. Cardiac motion atlases provide a space of reference in which the motion fields of a cohort of subjects can be directly compared. In this work, a cardiac motion atlas is built from cine MR data from the UK Biobank (~ 6000 subjects). Two automated quality control strategies are proposed to reject subjects with insufficient image quality. Based on the atlas, three dimensionality reduction algorithms are evaluated to learn data-driven cardiac motion descriptors, and statistical methods used to study the association between these descriptors and non-imaging data. Results show a positive correlation between the atlas motion descriptors and body fat percentage, basal metabolic rate, hypertension, smoking status and alcohol intake frequency. The proposed method outperforms the ability to identify changes in cardiac function due to these known cardiovascular risk factors compared to ejection fraction, the most commonly used descriptor of cardiac function. In conclusion, this work represents a framework for further investigation of the factors influencing cardiac health.Comment: 2018 International Workshop on Statistical Atlases and Computational Modeling of the Hear

Alcohol consumption and leukocyte telomere length.

The relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality generally exhibits a U-shaped curve. The longevity observed with moderate alcohol consumption may be explained by other confounding factors, and, if such a relationship is present, the mechanism is not well understood. Indeed, the optimal amount of alcohol consumption for health has yet to be determined. Leukocyte telomere length is an emerging quantifiable marker of biological age and health, and a shorter telomere length is a predictor of increased mortality. Because leukocyte telomere length is a quantifiable and objectively measurable biomarker of aging, we sought to identify the amount of alcohol consumption associated with the longest telomere length and least telomere length attrition. Among over 2,000 participants from two distinct cohort studies, we found no pattern of alcohol consumption that was associated with longer telomere length or less telomere length attrition over time. Binge drinking may reduce telomere length. Using telomere length as a marker of age and health, these data fail to demonstrate any benefits of alcohol consumption, even when consumed in moderation

Low LDL-C and High HDL-C Levels Are Associated with Elevated Serum Transaminases amongst Adults in the United States: A Cross-sectional Study

Background: Dyslipidemia, typically recognized as high serum triglyceride, high low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) or low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) levels, are associated with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). However, low LDL-C levels could result from defects in lipoprotein metabolism or impaired liver synthetic function, and may serve as ab initio markers for unrecognized liver diseases. Whether such relationships exist in the general population has not been investigated. We hypothesized that despite common conception that low LDL-C is desirable, it might be associated with elevated liver enzymes due to metabolic liver diseases. Methods and Findings: We examined the associations between alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and major components of serum lipid profiles in a nationally representative sample of 23,073 individuals, who had no chronic viral hepatitis and were not taking lipid-lowering medications, from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1999 to 2010. ALT and AST exhibited non-linear U-shaped associations with LDL-C and HDL-C, but not with triglyceride. After adjusting for potential confounders, individuals with LDL-C less than 40 and 41–70 mg/dL were associated with 4.2 (95% CI 1.5–11.7, p = 0.007) and 1.6 (95% CI 1.1–2.5, p = 0.03) times higher odds of abnormal liver enzymes respectively, when compared with those with LDL-C values 71–100 mg/dL (reference group). Surprisingly, those with HDL-C levels above 100 mg/dL was associated with 3.2 (95% CI 2.1–5.0, p<0.001) times higher odds of abnormal liver enzymes, compared with HDL-C values of 61–80 mg/dL. Conclusions: Both low LDL-C and high HDL-C, often viewed as desirable, were associated with significantly higher odds of elevated transaminases in the general U.S. adult population. Our findings underscore an underestimated biological link between lipoprotein metabolism and liver diseases, and raise a potential need for liver evaluation among over 10 million people with particularly low LDL-C or high HDL-C in the United States

Identifying and Tracking Gas Suicides in the U.S. Using the National Violent Death Reporting System, 2005–2012

IntroductionIdentifying the source and specific type of gas used in suicides is difficult using most data systems owing to limitations in ICD-10 coding. The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), with its rich collection of both coded and free-text variables, has the potential to overcome these limitations. This study used a multipronged approach to identify gas-specific suicides in NVDRS and to track the incidence of these suicides over time.MethodsUsing suicide cases from the 16 NVDRS states that participated throughout 2005–2012, free-text and code searches were conducted for four types of variables—incident narratives, coroner/medical examiner cause-of-death statements, cause-of-death codes, and substance names—to identify suicides by carbon monoxide, helium, hydrogen sulfide, and four other gases. All analyses were conducted in 2015.ResultsApproximately 4% (3,242 of 80,715) of suicides recorded in NVDRS over the study period were the result of gas inhalation. Of these, the majority (73%) were carbon monoxide suicides (almost exclusively from motor vehicle exhaust and charcoal burning). Other types of gas (most notably helium), once rare, are now more common: At the start of the study period non–carbon monoxide gas suicides represented 15% of all gas suicides; at the end of the study period, they represented 40%.ConclusionsPublic health policies to reduce a suicidal person’s access to more lethal suicide methods require a reliable source of surveillance data on specific methods used in suicide. Small changes to NVDRS could make it an efficient and nimble surveillance system for tracking these deaths